Southern Woman's Story, A.
Inscribed To W.D. Howells
Pember, Phoebe Yates. A Southern Woman’s Story. New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1879.
8vo.; several pages dog-eared; light violet cloth, decoratively stamped in black and blind; extremities lightly frayed.
First edition of Pember’s only book, a memoir of her Civil War service as the first woman administrator of Chimborazo, a Confederate army hospital outside Richmond, Virginia. Howes P189. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to William Dean Howells: With Mrs. Pember’s compliments to the author of the Lady of Aristook [sic]. 12 March 1879 New York Hotel. (Howells’s novel The Lady of Aroostook had been published earlier that year.) In addition, Pember added minor autograph emendations in pencil on three pages (pp. 37, 39, 54). Signed on the first blank by a later owner, “Miss Moore/ 17 Gerry St./ Cambridge/ Mass.”
Phoebe Yates Levy Pember (1823-1913) was raised in South Carolina by her “prosperous and cultured” parents, early and staunch advocates of Reformed Judaism. Well-educated and independent, after she was widowed in 1861 she attained the post of matron at Chimborazo, in charge of the “housekeeping and patient diet” in 31 wards, through her acquaintance with the wife of the George W. Randolph, the Confederate Secretary of War. Bell I. Wiley estimates that Pember and her assistants cared for over fifteen thousand men during the course of the War; Pember herself wrote, to her sister: “I have not been able to get a cook and everything for seven hundred sick men has to be cooked under my eyes by two black imps of fourteen.” In addition to the pressures of her daily labors, the added strain of war-time conditions, and the general disapproval of many of the men with whom she worked, Pember had to face a harsh economic reality: she could not live on her monthly salary of $40. To supplement her income, Pember devoted her spare time to writing for magazines and for the War Department, and after the end of the War began A Southern Woman’s Story.
Reflecting her own forthright temperament, the book is written in a good-humored anecdotal vein, without sentimentality. The author’s strongest words are reserved for the drunken surgeons she encountered, but her story in general does not reflect great credit on those charged with the care of Confederate sick and wounded. Composed after the event, and with an eye to literary effect, Mrs. Pember’s book lacks the rough immediacy of Kate Cumming’s war journal. It nonetheless stands as a valuable account of conditions in a major Confederate hospital and an interesting record of one woman’s service to the Confederate cause. (“Phoebe Yates Levy Pember,” by Wiley, NAW 3, p. 45)
Other historians note this text for its style and historical import; it has been cited as possibly “the most delightful of all Confederate narratives” (In Tall Cotton, p. 147), and as “especially good for accounts of hospital adjustments to wartime privations” (CWB II, p. 198).
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